Time Magazine, History Channel Ramp Up Oswald-JFK Fake News

Many independent experts on the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy dispute the key claims in a new Time Magazine feature story published on April 25 that puffs up History channel's launch that evening of a new series purporting to shed new light on the killing.

Instead, Time's coverage of the six-part series "JFK Declassified: Tracking Oswald" continues the magazine's shameful tradition of misleading its readers regarding a pivotal event in the nation's history.

History channel, despite its name and its past under different ownership featuring historical documentaries, now focuses on "reality" shows. That means scripted fakery for purely entertainment purposes and likely, in this instance, for propaganda purposes.

So, the notion that a "reality show" should be taken seriously by a major publication like Time even if a series is mislabeled as "history" is preposterous on its face unless the enterprise were part of larger public relations scheme, as this seems to be.

The specifics here are worth examining because they help illustrate how Time, its corporate affiliates like CNN, and most other mainstream media deliberately confuse the public on the most vital public affairs issues in collaboration with intelligence agencies even as they claim to oppose "fake news" and alternative media.

In JFK Declassified: Fallback to the Original Phase One Cover Story, longtime JFK researcher William Kelly provided this review: "The much-ballyhooed History channel six-part “documentary," JFK Declassified, is a slick but unconvincing piece of propaganda, a classic case of disinformation that mixes some truth with total falsehoods to promote the original Phase One cover-story for the Dealey Plaza Operation: that the Cuban Castro Communists were behind it."

More generally, the Kennedy assassination provides a Rosetta Stone to understanding media coverage of more recent sensitive events involving intelligence and law enforcement agencies.

Young people, especially those who might be inclined to regard the 196Os deaths of JFK and numerous witnesses as a pointless obsession by old-timers and complainers, should reflect on the continuing importance: Few can see documentary evidence of what's really happening in Middle East wars or investigations of Russian influence on U.S. public officials, advisors and elections, for example. For the most part, we know only what reporters and government experts choose to tell us. But, largely ignored by the media, courageous eye-witnesses have told their JFK murder stories and dedicated researchers have mined some four million pages of declassified JFK documents and found compelling evidence disproving the official story still foisted upon the public by the corporate-controlled media.

Shaping the JFK Narrative

Kennedy's 100th birthday is on May 29. So the History channel's six-week series helps shape public attention for an iconic presidency that ended with his slaying in broad daylight in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963.

Almost immediately after JFK's death, authorities pronounced the case as solved when JFK's accused slayer Lee Harvey Oswald (shown on a 1964 Time cover) was killed by nightclub owner Jack Ruby on live television in a Dallas police station two days later.

Then as now, the corporate-controlled news media typified by Time worked closely with authorities to deliver a mixture of news and public relations to a shocked nation. The public received little in-depth reporting about the murder; instead, it got blanket coverage of the ceremonies and transition to the administration of a successor president, Lyndon B. Johnson.

Although the American public has been repeatedly deceived by top officials and their media allies about basic facts regarding Kennedy's death, the official account is so incredible for so many reasons that public opinion polls for decades have shown that large majorities do not believe the central finding of the Warren Commission: The blue-ribbon panel led by Supreme Court Justice Earl Warren and including former CIA Director Allen Dulles found that Oswald killed Kennedy while acting alone.

Wild Goose Chase?

Coverage this week by Time magazine (and apparently History channel) appears to accept the Commission's findings as core truth. The TV series apparently goes on to distract the public with essentially a wild goose chase speculating about the meaning of Oswald's activities. Thus, the video series first segment on April 25, Former CIA Operative Argues Lee Harvey Oswald's Cuba Connections Went Deep, explored a long-discredited thesis that Oswald's travels help suggest potential sympathy for him from Cuban and Soviet Communist leaders, thus potentially linking them to his death.

This diverts public attention from compelling evidence that Oswald, a former Marine trusted with involvement in the ultra-secret U-2 spy plane operation, had been acting as a low-level U.S. government asset with ties to the CIA, FBI and military intelligence before the assassination. Compare Oswald's Marine photo at left with Time's portrayal to get a sense of the propaganda techniques in play. Which photo looks more like an anti-American deranged killer?

By this interpretation, Oswald's ostensibly suspicious activities were his cover to ingratiate himself with Communists to help his U.S. superiors advance their anti-Communist agendas — and all of his work could be conveniently transformed into making Oswald into a patsy, or fall guy, for assassination if needed.

A declassified transcript of a 1964 Warren Commission executive committee meeting shows Dulles (shown in a file photo) urging his fellow commissioners to help squelch public reports at the time that Oswald had been a government agent.

Outraged over the CIA's Bay of Pigs debacle and other out-of-control activities, JFK had forced the resignation of Dulles in 1962 along with the director's two top aides. One was Gen. Charles Cabell (shown below left), whose brother Earle Cabell was the mayor of Dallas during the killing. Those are not the kind of connections Time Magazine and its peers like to pursue.

But we shall, with an in-depth look below at Time's close historical connection with the nation's propaganda apparatus at the highest levels.

Fast forward to the present: The History channel show's host is Robert Baer, a former CIA officer who purports to act as an independent expert. But Baer's conclusions appear to parrot the 1964 Warren Commission report and obscure questions about the CIA's apparent multiple roles in the JFK death and investigation. Those ties run extremely deep, according to some four million pages of documents pertaining to the assassination that have been declassified since the commission's report was published, with many of the most revealing documents published in recent years because of public pressure through Congress and litigation.

Experience has shown that financial and other career rewards tend to be far richer for JFK assassination researchers like Baer who endorse the official findings rather than interview the many dissenters, who publish books that are rarely reviewed and convene at packed-to-capacity conferences that rarely include a reporter from a mainstream news organization.

This editor attends such conferences and knows that people are still living who knew Oswald as a friend, including as a fellow U.S. Marine — and who doubt his intention or ability to kill Kennedy. Even if one discounts such personal testimonials, compelling scientific evidence suggests that Oswald could not have killed Kennedy from the rear because the fatal shot came from the president's right front.

Fake Reality Becomes 'History'

But those kinds of central, legitimate questions do not appear to be the focus on the History channel series, according to Time's online account by staff writer Olivia B. Waxman.

The show's star is Baer, age 64, now a CNN commentator and host on History channel's reality shows. He is shown in a file photo below.

History channel, a basic cable network, is owned by the Arts & Entertainment Network as a joint venture between Hearst and the Disney Corp. The owners have transformed it into a "reality show" network from its roots in documentaries and history. In other words, it provides fake reality on important topics, thereby enabling fake news puffery from such outlets as Time Magazine.

This sleight-of-hand has occurred many times previously in the media's efforts to confuse the public with heavily promoted but preposterous explanations for JFK's killing. One such wacko idea aired repeatedly in books and a 2013 TV movie, JFK: The Smoking Gun, is that Secret Service agent George Hickey accidentally killed Kennedy during the Dallas motorcade. That's pure distraction and was deeply embarrassing to the innocent Secret Service agent before his death, as we reported here in the 2015 column Understanding Hollywood-Style Presidential Propaganda From JFK To Trump.

Waxman fails to address the basic issue with her thesis and History channel's premise: That a career spy like Baer trained to fool people would suddenly start informing the public about the CIA's secrets regarding the crime of the century, even though the evidence is clear that apologists for the Warren Commission tend to make far more money and obtain far more news coverage than whistleblowers.

Among the disputed assumptions and opinions in the Time article (and apparently in the film series, as reported by Waxman) are the claims parroting the Warren Report's conclusion that Oswald "acted alone" in killing Kennedy, as Waxman wrote. Some experts dispute whether Oswald, who was seen on the Texas School Book Depository Building's second floor about 90 seconds after the shooting, ever shot at JFK from the building's sixth floor or at the policeman Tippit later in a residential section of Dallas, as authorities claimed.

Such disputes are ultimately less significant than the clear-cut evidence that Time Magazine (and such Time Warner affiliates as Life Magazine and CNN) are among the government-influenced media that have long suppressed vital witness and documentary evidence. This week's Time article and series are yet another example of how these outlets apparently do not report for the most part even that major controversies exist, much less that compelling evidence supports what they like to smear as "conspiracy theory," as we have reported here.

Solid evidence exists, for example, that Oswald, a former U.S. Marine who held high-level security clearance while working on the U-2 spy plane project, was a U.S.-government asset. He pretended to be a pro-Communist defector to the Soviet Union and he similarly advocated for Fidel Castro upon return to the United States in 1962 only as an assignment. Oswald's government contacts in 1962 and 1963 have long been reported to have included the late New Orleans private detective Guy Banister (shown at left), a committed anti-Communist and former high-ranking FBI executive spotted with Oswald in friendly conversation.

Separately, Antonio Veciana, the former commander of the anti-Castro assassination squad Alpha 66, published a memoir Trained To Kill last week confirming his veiled assertion that his friend and former CIA case officer, the late David Atlee Phillips, once introduced him to Oswald at the 42-story Southland Center in Dallas office. Veciana believes (partly on the basis of a Texas bystander who has stepped forward to say he saw them that day) that the date on Sept. 7, 1963, which was 11 weeks before Kennedy was fatally shot in the city on Nov. 22, 1963.

Shot In the Head

Veciana came close to making the claim about Phillips in the late 1970s to congressional investigator Gaeton Fonzi. Fonzi persuaded Veciana to tell his story to help the probe of the House Select Committee on Assassinations, the last formal inquiry into the Kennedy assassination. But Veciana was nearly killed after the testimony in 1979 by being shot in the head in Miami, where he lived following years of work with the CIA organizing fellow Cuban exiles to work with the CIA to try to kill Fidel Castro and other Communist leaders.

The backstory provides a fascinating interplay between journalism, propaganda and assassination, among other topics of continuing relevance. According to Veciana's account, he was the leader of Cuba's national association for accountants and held a prominent banking job when he became disillusioned with Castro. The CPA said he was recruited by Phillips (operating under the code name Maurice Bishop) to help lead a long-term campaign of anti-Castro propaganda, bank robberies and bombings that played a significant role in destabilizing Cuba's economy. Veciana said he coordinated three major assassination attempts on Castro, two with CIA backing. He said two of the attempts relied on training assassins who had created false identities as journalists so they could kill Castro at press conferences during foreign trips. Each attempt failed.

Phillips, shown in a file photo, was a World War II veteran who used his post-war jobs as a newspaperman and actor to rise within the CIA. He supervised operations of the Cuban exile community and retired as chief of the agency's Western Hemisphere operations under CIA Director Richard Helms (shown below at right), also a former journalist. Phillips used scores of secret identities as he supervised attempts to overthrow Castro and other leftists governments in Latin America according to declassified documents and books, including those by historian Dr. John M. Newman, a military intelligence officer for two decades.

In a 2014 conference on the 50th anniversary of the Warren Commission report, Veciana (speaking in Spanish with a son as an interpreter) said he would identify Phillips then for the first time as "Bishop" because he wanted to set the historical record straight. Veciana said he wanted to do so before death because of his love for his adopted nation, the United States, and his recognition late in life that Kennedy was not a traitor to the anti-Communist cause but instead a president trying to fulfill his duties as best he saw them.

The memoir, co-authored with Carlos Harrison and with a foreword by historian David Talbot, is published by Skyhorse, which has published many other books on the Kennedy assassination, including Fonzi's memoir The Last Investigation.

Talbot's in-depth 2015 study The Devil's Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America's Secret Government, published by Harper, was largely ignored by mainstream media even though Talbot's previous book, Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years, had been a best-seller.

Anyone interested in history, intelligence, the book industry or the Kennedy years can doubtless learn more in similar fashion by observing the treatment the corporate-controlled media accord (or withhold) regarding Antonio Veciana's riveting, courageous and important memoir.

Patterns Of Propaganda

Last week, the alternative website Waking Times republished a sardonic but credible column first published by Michael J. Sweeney entitled, The 25 Rules of Disinformation. It began, "We are in the post-constitutional era in the United States, a time when the government does whatever it wants to whomever it wants, and there is not a thing anyone can do about it. How it is possible that the president can bomb a foreign country or threaten a full-scale international war without so much as even mentioning the need for Congress to chime in, let alone actually vote on a declaration of war?"

With that preamble, the author provided a list of 25 techniques, most of which are readily apparent to those who have studied (as has this editor) media coverage of the killing of John Kennedy and other dubious official narratives since then.

Examining those patterns in terms of Time-Life coverage is especially instructive because the magazine empire was so important nationally then in terms of readership and JFK coverage. Under the successor company Time Warner (parent of CNN), the company continues to be influential and less than honest, as indicated by its Time story this week and CNN coverage of Kennedy's murder that we shall examine in a future column.

In the early 1960s, Time (advertised as a "news" publication) was arguably the most politically influential magazine in America. Its sister publication, Life, similarly set the tone for visual impact, particularly in the early days of television when evening news broadcasts were just 15 minutes long and all television programming was broadcast in black-and-white.

Biographers have chronicled how founder Henry R. Luce used his editorial power behind the scenes in surreptitious ways similar to propaganda in order to advance what he liked to call "The American Century" and other political goals, such as anti-communism as well as the usual fare of sports, entertainment and other popular material.

Thus his quoted statement portrayed at left was not simply a slogan but instead a key to understanding how his magazines were organized to achieve his goals.

Kennedy's death in Dallas prompted Luce's team to swing into action in ways that determined the course of history.

Time Publisher Charles "CD" Jackson, a master propagandist who had held top-level jobs in the federal government and at Time-Life, acquired the exclusive rights to both a film of the shooting by Abraham Zapruder and to the memoirs of Oswald's widow Marina Oswald. But rather than publish the materials widely, as one might expect from a publisher, Jackson and his company suppressed them both for the most part, except for material (such as still shots from the Zapruder film) that could be used in Life to suggest Oswald's guilt.

The Zapruder film was suppressed from full public view for 12 years until 1975, when the civic-minded and intrepid film technician Robert Groden delivered a purloined copy to the then-ambitious and courageous ABC-TV host Geraldo Rivera.

For many if not most viewers, the film contradicted the narrative by the Warren Commission and corporate-controlled media that Kennedy's head movements showed he had been fatally shot from the rear, Oswald's location as an employee of the Texas School Depository. Instead, the film seems to validate the conclusion of many eyewitnesses and forensic experts who said that the fatal shot came from the vicinity of a picket fence on a grassy knoll to Kennedy's right front.

Our photo at right was taken from behind that fence on the 50th anniversary of the death. At center is a spot on the street that Groden repeatedly paints as a memorial to the slain president on the approximate spot of his death. Dallas authorities have repeatedly removed that cross from visibility in a Lady MacBeth "Out damned spot" exercise. They have arrested Groden nearly 90 times through the years as part of their effort to deter his painting and book-selling at the scene.

A review of the history, including some four million pages of declassified assassination documents and the statements of forensic doctors and other experts who describe Kennedy as being shot from the front, leads to a perception that the big-time national media still care more about protecting the official story than using a documentary series to explore honestly the troubling questions about JFK's death.

In 1963, Jackson was well-prepared for his role to help orchestrate this process. He had honed his skills with Time-Life beginning in the 1930s. After stints with the CIA's World War II predecessor, the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), Jackson served in the Eisenhower White House as a national security advisor to the president.

Some historians have called Jackson America's top psychological warfare expert of his era and also the nation's most important anti-Communist Cold Warrior.

At the White House, for example, Jackson played the key role in organizing the secret annual Bilderberg Group conferences for many years under the leadership of the billionaire Rockefeller and Rothschild families. Starting 1954 in the Bilderberg Hotel in the rural Dutch town of Oosterbeck, the group has convened about 130 Western financiers, diplomats, media moguls and industrialists (along with occasional crowned heads of such nations as the Netherlands and United Kingdom) to discuss matters known only to them but presumably affecting the major Western democracies.

Jackson served as a top White House liaison to Hollywood to foster anti-Communist themes in 1950s movies. He is shown with one of his Hollywood contacts, Darryl Zanuck of Twentieth Century Fox.

Manipulation of public perceptions on the JFK murder can be observed in many ways. Time's cover portraying Oswald above, for example, fostered media's pervasive public relations campaign portraying him as an anti-American killer. More generally, the nation's major newspapers, broadcasters and other media are reported to have cooperated with the CIA in a program called Operation Mockingbird. This was run by the CIA's Frank Wisner, who was in frequent but informal coordination with Washington Post Publisher Philip Graham, whose widow Katharine Graham wrote in her memoir that they all dined weekly together with Wisner's wife.

Left unmentioned, except in other accounts, was that leading news organizations would cooperate on national security grounds in news coverage of sensitive events. In 1977, former Washington Post reporter and Pulitzer Prize co-winner Carl Bernstein ripped the curtain off the influence-peddling in a 25,000-word article published by Rolling Stone Magazine. His The CIA and the Media, published on Oct. 20, 1977 and now available via his website "Carl Bernstein," reported that more than 400 reporters, media owners and top managers had been working for the CIA.

In 1979, author Deborah Davis described Operation Mockingbird and its close connections with Washington Post editors more thoroughly in her book Katharine the Great, named for Washington Post Publisher Katharine Graham. But the book's publisher, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, shredded virtually all copies of the book immediately after "publication" because of strong pressure from the newspaper and its powerful allies. An updated Katharine the Great was republished in 1987, and most recently by the Sheriden Square Press in 1991.

Even more generally, researchers have documented a vast black budget, some of it taxpayer money via the CIA and its front groups and some via cooperating private sector groups. This secret money administered by Wisner and his successor Cord Meyer (whose ex-wife Mary Pinchot Meyer had been having a long-running affair with President Kennedy in the early 1960s that ended with his murder in 1963 and hers less than a year later). The CIA funds secretly funded publishers, professors, pundits, foundations, unions, and other private corporations willing to cooperate on a confidential basis with the government's national security program, as documented by numerous recent books. These include Legacy of Ashes by Tim Weiner (2007), The Mighty Wurlitzer: How the CIA Played America by Hugh Wilford (2008), A Self-Portrait of a Scoundrel by Chauncey Holt (2013), John Courtney Murray, Time/Life, and the American Proposition: How the CIA's Doctrinal Warfare Program Changed the Catholic Church by David A. Wemhoff (2015), and The Almost Classified Guide to CIA Front Companies, Proprietaries & Contractors by Wayne Madsen (2016).

The existence of these secret funding sources was well-known to insiders in Washington, DC, Hollywood and New York City along with several elite universities especially and thus helped shape the nation's thought leadership and direct it towards CIA-friendly initiatives.

As a few of many examples with at least tangential relevance to the JFK murder: Kai Bird, biographer of Warren Commission member John J. McCloy, the former top leader of the Chase banking empire, the Ford Foundation and the World Bank, wrote in his 1992 biography The Chairman, that the Ford Foundation was the nation's top secret conduit in the 1950s for CIA secret money; and former Navy intelligence officer and NSA analyst Wayne Madsen last year published The Almost Classified Guide to CIA Front Companies, Proprietaries and Contractors, a unique A-Z, 400-page encyclopedia of organizations used to provide "plausible deniability" and other cover to agency operations.

Today's Time Magazine JFK Coverage: Merely Opinion or Fake News?

Time Magazine's continued bias and/or deliberate disinformation on this topic is illustrated by the opening of its online column by Olivia Waxberg, who appears from her bio and photo to be a relatively young writer with scant apparent background in relevant historical studies.

She might be appalled to learn the history of her employer regarding Kennedy assassination coverage. Or she might be favorably impressed and react as have countless others at high ranks of American journalism who go along to get along.

Dan Rather (the only reporter allowed to see the Zapruder film by Time-Life), Bob Schieffer, Jim Lehrer and many others got their big break by "covering" the assassination and by never pursuing the kinds of angles cited here. Bill Moyers, President Johnson's press secretary, in effect orchestrated the cover-up, we now know from declassified documents and other contemporary accounts, thereby enabling him to pursue an impressive career otherwise, just as the others did. Some put on a blank face when asked about evidence contrary to their reporting and some get angry, according to my research and first-hand experience.

What's certain from reading the story is that, without even a pretense of recognizing the mountain of evidence since 1964 undercutting Warren Commission claims, Waxman (in tandem with superiors at a magazine that traditionally is heavily shaped by editors) flatly asserts the highly dubious official story as uncontroverted fact this way:

After Lee Harvey Oswald shot President John F. Kennedy shortly after noon on Nov. 22, 1963, things moved quickly. About an hour later, Oswald fatally shot Dallas police officer J.D. Tippit. Thirty minutes after that, police found Oswald and arrested him. Two days later, on Nov. 24, Jack Ruby shot Oswald (shown in a 1964 Time cover photo just as the Warren Commission report was released). And just a day after the assassination, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover had already expressed his preliminary finding that Oswald had acted alone. The full Warren Commission report would later back up that finding — but more than a half-century later, polls have found that most Americans are not convinced of that fact.

Your Choices for 'Reality'

One blog post cannot summarize all the major reasons why Time and other media do not try to report the secrets of the Kennedy assassination except in such timid and sporadic fashion.

The Justice Integrity Project's so-far 37-part "Readers Guide to the JFK Assassination" is better suited for that. The guide contains links below to a wide range of research materials. Among them are listings of the most important of the 2,500 or so books on the topic of the JFK assassination, with every significant point of view represented. The guide also has many columns that document how a cover-up has persisted to the present.

There are many other sources for the curious and civic-minded. Many critics of the Warren Commission cite the 2009 book JFK and the Unspeakable by James Douglass as the single best book surveying previous research and explaining why JFK was killed and the crime covered up.

For the video-inclined, two recent documentaries have impressive producers and treatments.

One is The Searchers produced by award-winning independent filmmaker Randolph Benson, a film instructor at the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University. The film's evocative poster is at left.

The film, available on DVD, portrays courageous searchers for truth about the assassination, both experts and scholars, who have long been ignored by the media. The film was recently awarded the Orson Welles Prize at the 16th Tiburon International Film Festival. Upcoming screenings include the Dealey Plaza UK Conference in Canterbuy, UK on April 29, the Freethought International Film Festival in Orlando on May 6, the Varsity Theater in Chapel Hill, NC on May 18, and Tsunami Books in Eugene, OR on June 9. Admirers of the producer (including this editor) are seeking a venue for a screening in the Washington, DC area congruent with the JFK 100th birthday anniversary in May.

Another important video launch will be the premiere on May 26 at the Beverly Hills Music Hall of John Barbour's latest installment of his documentary on the JFK assassination, The American Media: The 2nd Assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Barbour is the narrator and Myra Bronstein is the producer. Another screening will be June 9 for a week at Cinema Village in Manhattan. A trailer for the film can be seen here.

There is an extreme irony in that launch: Barbour, creator of the 1970s hit show Real People, is regarded as the godfather of reality television. Yet he has devoted many years to an actual documentary about the JFK case that blames the media for a "second assassination."

Meanwhile, major media focus on such distractions as the so-called History channel's so-called "reality" offering.

This is not mere history. Resolution of the key issues, perhaps made possible by the National Archives scheduled release in October of remaining documents suppressed by agencies like the CIA, will help illuminate current events and their credibility of coverage by outlets like Time.

In sum, Time's fundamental assumptions — that Oswald is proven to have acted alone in killing JFK and the policeman Tippit, and that the former CIA case officer, Baer, is a genuinely independent expert willing to expose the agency or others if needed in order to alert the public to the truth — are dubious at best to many other experts.

But Time Magazine and its peers in the corporate-controlled media — including the online Daily Beast in a new column From Russia, With Love by longtime Warren Report defender Max Holland — are still accepting this CIA-inspired Cold War hokum with scant question.

The April 3 edition of Time has a cover story "Is Truth Dead?" that focused only on failures of the Trump presidency. But for self-protection the public needs to focus attention also on outlets like Time, which is once again touting fake reality instead of providing real reporting.

At this point, how dare they denounce fake news.

Contact the author This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

Justice Integrity Project Readers Guide To JFK Assassination

* Denotes major articles in this Readers Guide series

At right is a photo by this editor in Dallas showing Dealey Plaza. The Texas Book Depository Building where Oswald worked is behind the row of trees. The car in the center lane is near the location of President Kennedy's limo at the time of his fatal shooting.

Editor's Recommendations

Propaganda and Psychological Warfare Techniques

Hear no evil: Mitch & Bonnie Lewandowski Photo via Flickr

Waking Times, The 25 Rules of Disinformation, originally written by Michael J. Sweeney and reprinted by Isaac Davis, April 17, 2017. We are in the post-constitutional era in the United States, a time when the government does whatever it wants to whomever it wants, and there is not a thing anyone can do about it. How it is possible that the president can bomb a foreign country or threaten a full-scale international war without so much as even mentioning the need for Congress to chime in, let alone actually vote on a declaration of war?

The short answer is, disinformation and propaganda, which is the domain of mainstream media. When people are confused, when truth is hidden, when agendas are presented as life or death options, and when the public has no clue about which laws government is bound to, then anything goes.

READ: 11 Tactics Used by the Mainstream Media to Manufacture Consent for the Oligarchy:

1. Hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil. Regardless of what you know, don’t discuss it — especially if you are a public figure, news anchor, etc. If it’s not reported, it didn’t happen, and you never have to deal with the issues.

2. Become incredulous and indignant. Avoid discussing key issues and instead focus on side issues which can be used show the topic as being critical of some otherwise sacrosanct group or theme. This is also known as the “How dare you!” gambit.

3. Create rumor mongers. Avoid discussing issues by describing all charges, regardless of venue or evidence, as mere rumors and wild accusations. Other derogatory terms mutually exclusive of truth may work as well. This method works especially well with a silent press, because the only way the public can learn of the facts are through such “arguable rumors”. If you can associate the material with the Internet, use this fact to certify it a “wild rumor” which can have no basis in fact.

Related News Coverage

Former CIA operative Bob Baer launched an investigation into the declassified government files on the case. On his six-part series "JFK Declassified: Tracking Oswald" — debuting Tuesday night (April 25) on the History channel — Baer attempts to demystify the link between Oswald and Cuban and Soviet operatives. It's no secret that, for example, Oswald went to a meeting at the Soviet embassy in Mexico eight weeks before he assassinated JFK, or that he tried to defect to the Soviet Union in 1959.

But Baer pursues those leads, and further investigates Oswald's connections to the Cuban dissident group Alpha 66, which had been infiltrated by Cuban intelligence officials who were reporting their activities back to Fidel Castro's government. His conclusion is that, while Oswald acted alone when he fired the bullets that killed the President, his connections to Cuban (including Castro, shown in a file photo) and Soviet officials were deeper than is often assumed.

JFKcountercoup, JFK Declassified: Fallback to the Original Phase One Cover Story, William Kelly, April 27, 2017. The much-ballyhooed History channel six-part “documentary," JFK Declassified, is a slick but unconvincing piece of propaganda, a classic case of disinformation that mixes some truth with total falsehoods to promote the original Phase One cover-story for the Dealey Plaza Operation: that the Cuban Castro Communists were behind it.

The guys who put together this program, 21-year CIA veteran Bob Baer and former LAPD (Los Angeles Police Department) lieutenant Adam Bercovici, a US military intelligence officer who has served in Iraq and Afghanistan, can and should be able to determine the truth. But Baer isn’t interested in determining the truth, and Bercoici is no Columbo. He worked for a police department that refuses to investigate and identify the true assassin(s) of RFK. So you can put this program in the same junk pile as the original cover story promoted by the DRE, Brian Latell, Phil Shenon, and others.

It is a very distinct psychological warfare operation promoted mainly by those with close ties to the CIA, and most of whom, as Dan Hardway points out, can be traced directly to one David Atlee Phillips, a CIA propaganda specialist and Oswald associate. While they promote the idea that they are presenting new information and the files are declassified, I haven’t seen anything new after the first installment, and can tell you that none of what they have fielded so far is from recently declassified documents.

Some of what they say is true, however, and can take the real investigation into the total truth onto another level such as the fact that Oswald used intelligence tradecraft. But first let’s dismiss the total falsehoods that are continuously repeated, beginning with the idea that one sniper alone, Lee Harvey Oswald, executed the President by himself.

Just as John Barron does when he discusses “disinformation,” he only applies it to the Soviets, when in fact the CIA and US military are more proficient in the use of disinformation and black propaganda and, as Dan Hardway notes in his review of Antonio Veciana’s book, former US Army and CIA officer Paul Linebarger wrote the book on such propaganda and disinformation and taught covert operational procedures and intelligence tradecraft to David A. Phillips, E. Howard Hunt and Edward Lansdale.

Assassination Archives and Research Center (AARC), A Professional Conspirator: Questions About Antonio Veciana and His Book 'Trained To Kill,' Dan Hardway, April 20, 2017. Dan Hardway, a practicing attorney, was an investigator for the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) who focused heavily on Mexican and Cuban-related leads in the JFK assassinaton). It appears to me that Antonio Veciana has, once again, been less than forthcoming in connection with the Kennedy assassination. I will try to explain why but, first, I want to note that in 1978 I believed Veciana’s story based entirely on [Former HSCA investigator] Gaeton Fonzi’s representation of the story and his work confirming many of the details.

My crediting his story about Phillips and Oswald was based on the credibility of the rest of his story as established by Gaeton. I heard Veciana speak in Bethesda [at an AARC 2014 conference on the 50th anniversary of the Warren Report] and also got to spend some time with him and Eddy Lopez outside of the conference. I still found Veciana to be essentially credible. So, I picked up the book with great anticipation to learn more about what he knows. I was disappointed....I was impressed in many places in the book with the wealth of recalled and reported detail that Veciana provides about his activities. This experience of that openness made Chapter 7 even more of a disappointment to me. The story of Phillips and Oswald meeting in Dallas has almost no detail. The only detail provided is from the story that Wynne Johnson recently came forward with. There is more detail in that reportage than there is in Veciana’s own recollections.

Politico, Will Trump Release the Missing JFK Files? Philip Shenon, April 27, 2017. Unless the president intervenes, we’ll soon know more secrets about the Kennedy assassination. The nation’s conspiracy-theorist-in-chief is facing a momentous decision. Will President Donald Trump allow the public to see a trove of thousands of long-secret government files about the event that, more than any other in modern American history, has fueled conspiracy theories – the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy?

The answer must come within months. And, according to a new timeline offered by the National Archives, it could come within weeks. Martha W. Murphy, the Archives official who oversees the records, said in an interview last month that a team of researchers with high-level security clearances is at work to prepare the JFK files for release and hopes to begin unsealing them in batches much earlier than October – possibly as early as summer.

Beyond releasing the 3,600 never-before-seen JFK files, the Archives is reviewing another 35,000 assassination-related documents, previously released in part, so they can be unsealed in full. Short of an order from the president, Murphy said, the Archives is committed to making everything public this year: “There’s very little decision-making for us.”

The Indicter, Time Magazine, History Channel Ramp Up Oswald-JFK Fake News, Andrew Kreig, April 28, 2017. The Indicter is a monthly magazine on human rights & geopolitical issues. The Editor-in-chief is Professor Marcello Ferrada de Noli (shown in a file photo). Andrew Kreig is a member of the Editorial Board and associate editor. Many independent experts on the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy dispute the key claims in a new Time Magazine feature story published on April 25 that puffs up History channel's launch that evening of a new series purporting to shed new light on the killing.

Fifth Estate (Published in Indonesia with international distribution), Andrew Kreig: Time Magazine, History Channel Ramp Up Oswald, JFK Fake News, Edited by Robert Finnegan, April 29, 2017 (Republished from Justice Integrity Project). Once credible media entities now compete with tabloids in a race to the bottom of journalistic integrity. Many independent experts on the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy dispute the key claims in a new Time Magazine feature story published on April 25 that puffs up History channel's launch that evening of a new series purporting to shed new light on the killing.

Moscow’s single most effective influence operation remains the one induced 50 years ago this month, when the now-defunct New Orleans States-Item published a front-page story on April 25, 1967, entitled “Mounting Evidence Links CIA to ‘Plot’ Probe.” It was an operation that culminated in an unimaginable success — a Hollywood blockbuster by Oliver Stone contending that the CIA was behind JFK's assassination. That probe, as every conscious American knew, was district attorney Jim Garrison’s re-investigation of President Kennedy’s assassination amid a pronounced erosion of public confidence in the Warren Report.

Editor's Note: The Justice Integrity Project does not agree with the above commentary but publishes this summary to note viewpoints that are prominently published.

Rolling Stone Magazine via Carl Bernstein, The CIA and the Media, Carl Bernstein, Oct. 20, 1977. After leaving the Washington Post in 1977, Carl Bernstein spent six months looking at the relationship of the CIA and the press during the Cold War years. His 25,000-word cover story, published in Rolling Stone, is reprinted at this link. Wikipedia summarized the article as reporting that over 400 reporters, media owners and top managers were working for the CIA as part of Operation Mockingbird.

The now-iconic, pioneering article was drawn in part from revelations of the then-recent Senate Church Committee headed by Sen. Frank Church. The article began this way: "In 1953, Joseph Alsop, then one of America’s leading syndicated columnists, went to the Philippines to cover an election. He did not go because he was asked to do so by his syndicate. He did not go because he was asked to do so by the newspapers that printed his column. He went at the request of the CIA."

Ramparts Magazine, A Short Account of International Student Politics and the Cold War with Particular Reference to the NSA, CIA, etc., Sol Stein, Feb. 15, 1967. (Available via The Unz Review index.) As reported by Today In Civil Liberties History:

The March 1967 issue of Ramparts magazine created a national sensation by publishing an exposé of Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) secret funding of education groups, including primarily the National Student Association.

The article was titled, “A Short Account of International Student Politics and the Cold War with Particular Reference to the NSA, CIA, etc.” It was the first significant breach in the veil of secrecy surrounding the CIA, and the first revelation of secret funding of American organizations and journalists.

From the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s, Ramparts was the most important anti-war, counter-culture, general circulation magazines [sic] in the U.S. It was later revealed that the CIA learned of the forthcoming article and spied on the magazine and its writers in violation of the CIA charter that forbade the agency from spying within the United States.

Ad

Get New Articles by Email

News Reports

Note: Excerpts are from the authors' words except for subheads and occasional "Editor's notes" such as this.

May 25

Washington Post, New electoral maps for Ohio and Michigan can wait, Supreme Court says, Robert Barnes, May 25, 2019 (print ed.). While they consider the question of partisan gerrymandering, the justices put lower-court decisions finding those states’ maps unconstitutional on hold. The Supreme Court on Friday put on hold lower-court decisions that said Ohio and Michigan had to come up with new electoral maps because of unconstitutional partisan gerrymandering.

The decision was not surprising, because the justices are currently considering whether judges should even have a role in policing partisan gerrymandering. There were no noted dissents in the orders for either state.

The Supreme Court in March heard arguments in similar cases from North Carolina, where judges found that Republicans had manipulated congressional maps to their advantage, and from Maryland, where Democratic lawmakers redrew a district that resulted in a loss for a longtime Republican congressman.

While the Supreme Court regularly examines redistricting plans for signs of racial gerrymandering, it has never found a state’s plan so infected with partisan politics that it violates the rights of voters. The decision in the North Carolina and Maryland cases are expected before the end of June.

With the decisions from Ohio and Michigan, federal courts in five states have struck down maps as partisan gerrymanders. The courts in the Ohio and Michigan decisions ordered the states to come up with new maps that could be used in the 2020 elections.

May 24

UK's May Will Leave June 7

New York Times, Theresa May, Undone by Brexit, Will Step Down as Prime Minister, Stephen Castle, May 24, 2019. Mrs. May said she would resign after almost three years of trying and failing to lead Britain out of the European Union. Her departure is likely to set off a vicious contest to succeed her within the governing Conservative Party. Facing a cabinet rebellion, Theresa May announced on Friday morning her decision to leave office. She spoke briefly after meeting with Graham Brady, a powerful leader of backbench Conservative lawmakers.

Standing in front of 10 Downing Street, Mrs. May, shown in a file photo at right, said it was in the “best interests of the country for a new prime minister” to lead Britain through the Brexit process. She announced plans to step down as the leader of the Conservative Party on June 7, with the process to replace her beginning the following week.

“I feel as certain today as I did three years ago that in a democracy, if you give people a choice you have a duty to implement what they decide. I have done my best to do that,” she added. “I have done everything I can to convince MPs to back that deal. Sadly, I have not been able to do so.”

Conservative lawmakers have been deeply frustrated by Mrs. May’s failure to deliver on Brexit, which became the government’s central — some would say its sole — preoccupation after the country voted to leave the union in a 2016 referendum.

But the breaking point has come at an awkward moment, with President Trump scheduled to arrive in Britain on June 3 for a state visit and to take part in events to commemorate the 75th anniversary of the D-Day landings that preceded the end of World War II.

Trump Empowers Barr for "Spying" Probe

New York Times, Trump Gives Attorney General Sweeping Power in Review of 2016 Campaign Inquiry, Maggie Haberman and Michael S. Schmidt, May 24, 2019 (print ed.). The directive gives Mr. Barr immense leverage over the intelligence community and enormous power over what the public learns about the roots of the Russia investigation. President Trump took extraordinary steps on Thursday to give Attorney General William P. Barr, right, sweeping new authorities to conduct a review into how the 2016 Trump campaign’s ties to Russia were investigated, significantly escalating the administration’s efforts to place those who investigated the campaign under scrutiny.

In a directive, Mr. Trump ordered the C.I.A. and the country’s 15 other intelligence agencies to cooperate with the review and granted Mr. Barr the authority to unilaterally declassify their documents. The move — which occurred just hours after the president again declared that those who led the investigation committed treason — gave Mr. Barr immense leverage over the intelligence community and enormous power over what the public learns about the roots of the Russia investigation.

The order is a change for Mr. Trump, who last year dropped a plan to release documents related to the Russia ...

Mission Statement

Andrew Kreig's Twitter

Broadcast

Broadcast and lecture audiences can count on the Project's director to deliver blunt, entertaining and cutting-edge commentary about public affairs, with practical tips for the millions of Americans caught up in unfair litigation or regulation.

Based in Washington, DC, Andrew Kreig is an accomplished fighter for the public interest. Learn from his decades of reporting, analysis and advocacy:

• Shocking tales of recent corruption, deception and cover-up by both parties in communities ranging from small towns to world capitals; and• Practical how-to tips for reformers on action that brings real-world results.

Midnight Writer News Podcast,'Presidential Puppetry' with Andrew Kreig, Host S.T. Patrick, Dec. 19, 2018 (Episode 105). Andrew Kreig, the director of the Justice Integrity Project and the author of Presidential Puppetry, joins S.T. Patrick to discuss presidential politics of the last 40 years. What should we have known about George H.W. Bush, Bill & Hillary Clinton, George W. Bush, John Kerry, John Edwards, and John McCain?

Kreig takes a non-partisan approach to dissecting the pros, cons, misdeeds, and motivations of American presidential and vice-presidential candidates, dating back decades. In the interview, Kreig covers the Bush dynasty, why Reagan chose Bush in 1980, Bush and the October Surprise, the Willie Horton ad, The Election of 1992, Ross Perot’s deficiencies, what Fletcher Prouty still teaches us, the legitimacy of Bob Dole’s 1996 nomination, the value of Jack Kemp, Bush v Gore, The Two Johns: Kerry & Edwards, the real John McCain, and much more.

Kreig also discusses current events with us, including the Corsi/Stone vs Mueller situation and the unbelievable resolution of the Jeffery Epstein trial in Palm Beach. Andrew Kreig can be read and followed at the Justice Integrity Project.

Wiki Politiki, The Latest REAL News on the 9/11 Attacks and Finding Truth in a Sea of Lies, Steve Bhaerman, Dec. 18, 2018. An Interview with Andrew Kreig, Author, Attorney, Broadcaster and Founder of the Justice Integrity Project. Did you know that In a letter dated November 7, 2018, the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York notified the Lawyers’ Committee for 9/11 Inquiry that he would comply with the provisions of 18 U.S.C. § 3332 requiring him to present to a special grand jury the Lawyers’ Committee’s reports filed earlier this year of unprosecuted federal crimes at the World Trade Center?

You didn’t? That’s because mainstream media makes it its business to insure that anything that points to the nefarious doings of the real deep state is “none of its business.” The misinformation, disinformation and missing information that pollute corporate news have created the perfect field for “real” fake news to flourish.